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The Walrus Lab Hire The Walrus Lab Amazon First Novel Award

Amazon First Novel Award

For the nominees of this year’s Amazon First Novel Award, writing included a heavy dose of self-realization.

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Here, we dig into those sometimes accidental self-realizations, asking: how did the process of writing your novel help you better understand your own place in the world?

“I’ve spent the last few years failing to answer this question. When I fictionalize war, am I to impart a message? Keep the conversation alive in the public eye? Am I a cultural translator of ‘my’ people for a Western audience? Do I owe accuracy? Is accuracy even possible? If I think too hard on such questions (what my place is, what I owe to whom), my writing and the environment in which it thrives—playfulness, anonymity, risk-taking—risk death.

I suppose what I am is a mollusk. To live, I suck in the world around me; it seeps through a filter, and a slightly altered water comes out. Other mollusks pass my water through their own filter, and so on and so forth, resulting in a collective filtration. I don’t mean to imply that we necessarily improve the water—art that strives to be morally good can be the most morally suspect—but we do alter it.” – Maria Reva, Endling

“Small Ceremonies taught me a lot about Winnipeg and the many rez’s in its solar system. In my post-rez life, I often hated living there; I wanted nothing to do with it. But I came to learn that Winnipeg is a complicated, beautiful city with a unique place in Canadian history. There is a deep, almost Chekhovian sadness to it: not rejected, but unloved. And yet, somehow, Indigenous people—so used to operating in this space of uncertainty and frustration—have made it a cultural and political epicentre.

Small Ceremonies is a novel about characters coming of age, becoming aware of the world around them and their place in it. As a writer and a person who calls Winnipeg home, I emerged with them.” – Kyle Edwards, Small Ceremonies

“When I started writing I........

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